On a battleground thread, Thror said this:

"Somehow CF has steered towards being a game of sportsmanship. While I respect the intentions, there are instances when sportsmanship clearly contradicts roleplay."


I agree on both counts and just wanted to make a comment without derailing an already long death thread.

Sportsmanship does contradict roleplay, and in fact if people didn't play for fun/sportsmanship would make a lot of different choices. While there are exceptions, most roles in Thera would indicate that you should probably full-sac your enemy every time it's feasible. You should probably also gang them down as severely as you possibly can. Of course there can be RP reasons you wouldn't do that, but then you're still going out of your way to avoid it when I think it's obvious that if you hate someone enough to kill them you probably hate them enough to smash their belongings.

CF has always had some level of compromising rp for sportsmanship; There was never a time when full-saccing was the norm. But Thror is right that sportsmanship has increased. Corpseguard exists now, for example. I think there are two interrelated reasons for this. One is that the playerbase is just more mature which makes us more considerate in general, and smaller which adds a level of community familiarity. The second is that the game has gotten more time-intensive to be at a competitive level. Part of that is the nature of the game (no more purple potions) and part of that is a result of the smaller more experienced playerbase (when the game is made up of more high-prepping vets that raises the bar in general). Also regear sets are more time-consuming than they used to be. An unlimited jeweled broadsword and some skull rings just won't cut it in today's CF. Some of that is the availability of better gear, and some is the veterans again.

Personally I think that as long as CF's mechanics are moving away from grabbing a couple of purple potions and jeweled broadswords and being competitive, we really should keep the higher level of sportsmanship.